It is a principal object of fast food operators and managers of restaurants to provide their customers with food items that have a fresh-cooked taste. In high volume establishments, cooking on a per order basis is impossible. Instead, food items are generally precooked and placed in a heated food treatment cabinet for extended periods of time. Commercial designers of food treatment cabinets strive to maintain, as long as is practical, the temperature, appearance, taste, texture, and aroma of precooked food items. This goal often competes with the need to eliminate food-born bacteria. If the cooking space in the cabinet is maintained at temperatures in excess of 140.degree. F., most of the food-born bacteria is killed. However, at these elevated temperatures, the foods may be further cooked, which is undesirable as the foods will dry out over time. The result is that fast food operators and managers of restaurants permit only a very limited storage time to store precooked food items, after which time the food items are disposed of. Therefore, in such operations, profits may be increased if it were possible to lengthen the permissible storage time for food within the food treatment cabinet.
One attempt to preserve the just-cooked taste of foods has been disclosed by the Fortmann et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,835,368, hereby incorporated by reference herein, which discloses a food treatment/holding apparatus which delivers a metered amount of water at preselected intervals against a heated surface to produce water vapor in an interior food storage space. Also, an interval reset switch is disclosed which is operable upon a cabinet door being moved from its closed to its opened position. When the reset switch is operated, a pulse of water is released to replenish the vapor within the interior storage space that may have been lost to the atmosphere upon the cabinet door being opened. With such a food treatment cabinet apparatus, one problem which has been addressed by another Fortmann et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,891,498, hereby incorporated by reference herein, results from that fact that the amount of humidity which is released to the atmosphere is dependant upon the length of time which the door has been open; thus, sufficient relative humidity may not be replenished within the interior storage space to maintain the desired steaming of the food items stored therein. However, one problem which remains is the fact that only a limited number of discrete time periods can be compensated for owing to the use of relay technology.
Furthermore, it would be an advantage for product reliability purposes, and ease of field service in the event of in-service failure, to have food treatment apparatus to be of a solid-state design and construction. Microprocessor controlled logic within the food treatment apparatus would increase flexibility with respect to future feature changes and reduce field service constraints relating to the number of components required within the food treatment apparatus with respect to implementing the standardization required for large fast food establishments with thousands of multiple locations. Under these circumstances manufacturing learning curves would be applicable over time to effectively reduce the cost of manufacturing microprocessor controlled, solid-state food treatment apparatus.
The present invention is intended to overcome one or more problems set forth in the prior art.